For most people, handwriting on a physical medium is the most natural manner of recording information. Thus, digitizing tablets are commonly used as input devices for computer systems allowing the entry of handwritten information into a computer. Moreover, in the prior art, several techniques have been described using a transparent digitizing tablet superposed on a display device, such as an LCD screen. Such a device allows an electronic form to be displayed by the LCD screen, through the digitizing tablet, and the strokes or annotations produced by a pencil-like stylus on the digitizing tablet to be displayed on the underlying display device. An example of these techniques is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,212,297, by Sklarew, entitled “Handwritten keyboardless entry computer system”. Such a device is not adapted to be used with a physical document but only with an electronic document.
Other types of interfaces make it possible to write with real ink over a physical document, in paper form for example, superposed on a digitizing tablet. This latter is enabled to digitize and capture information handwritten on physical documents. However, such a method degrades the integrity of original physical documents since the document is marked with real ink annotations.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.